God's Formula (8 page)

“We lined up every boy. They were not among them,” said the young Frenchman. He and his colleague were sitting on an overturned steel locker, facing her.

“My contact thought otherwise.”

Silence. Except for the staccato sound of the rain hitting the corrugated steel roof of the warehouse.
Boys
, she thought,
sent to do a woman
’
s work.

“You say no one came in or out?”

“Just a priest and two alter boys,” the second young Frenchman answered. “We learned when we went in that the head priest was sick. The other priest came to say mass.”

“The priest was in his sickroom,” said the first young man. “He said a German woman was there yesterday. Was that you?” He had been relaxed, a meeting with his superior in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Paris nothing to be concerned about. But now a shadow passed over his eyes.
The child is worried.

“Two alter boys? How old?”

“Teenagers perhaps,” replied number two. “Not older.”

“No, they were young,” said number one. “Nine or ten.”

Lying
. “Are you surprised to be meeting me?”

“Honored,” said number two.

“Do you know the rule about meeting me?”

Both young agents shook their heads.
No.

“You don’t live to identify me. No one knows what I look like.”

Madame Amethyste walked behind the two men, took the nine millimeter Luger from her purse and shot each in the back of the head.

Outside, the rain continued to fall steadily. She had draped her stylish raincoat over the back of a rickety chair. She put it on and went out to her car.

“How was your flight?”

“Nasty. Delayed at Northolt, trouble landing.”

“Who are you?”

“Who am I?”

“What’s your cover?”

“Ah yes, my cover. The Oxford University Library. Here to grab up some first editions before the Nazis arrive and gather them all up for themselves.”

“Or burn them.”

“Yes. That’s what I told Father James. The school has a first edition of Montaigne’s Essays, circa 1580.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It was donated by the parents of a student who went in a snob and came out a scholar. I offered to take it back to England for safekeeping.”

“What’s that worth?”

“Priceless.”

“What did he say?”

“It’s gone to a family in Canada. Last month.”

Professor Tolkien and Ian Fleming sat facing each other in armchairs in the sitting room of Fleming’s fifth-floor suite at the Hotel Meurice. Tolkien was staying in an adjoining room. Outside, the rain was pelting. Tolkien, who had had a rough, windswept flight over the Channel, got up to stretch his legs. As he neared one of the corner room’s two, large, heavily-draped windows, thinking of uncramping his muscles and getting a glimpse of the Tuileries Gardens from above at the same time, he was stopped by Fleming. “Don’t,” his partner in espionage said as the professor was about to part the drapes. “I’m being watched. There’s a chap in a mack with a blue umbrella pretending to be looking at the Rodins.”

Tolkien pivoted and returned to his chair. “That explains it,” he said.

“Explains what?”

“The boys are gone. You must have been followed to the school.”

“Gone?”

“Yes.”

“Damn. How did you—?”

“I went to confession.”

“Confession?”

Professor Tolkien thought back to his brief meeting with the headmaster at the Petit College d’Avon.
Bless me father, for I have sinned…I lied to you. I am here to bring two of your students to England…

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“You bonded. He trusted you.”

“Yes. How could he not? He said that after you left, cars appeared front and rear, two men in each. They were there all night. He called a fellow priest and they got the boys out.

“Amazing. How?”

Tolkien watched Fleming’s frown turn into a smile as he told him the story of the switched alter boys.

“Excellent,” Fleming said when Tolkien was finished. “He did our work for us. Where are they?”

“He gave me the name of a priest in Montparnasse. Father Alain.”

“Are they with this Father Alain?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know?”

“No. Father Alain has connections to people who are preparing to stay in Paris and fight the Germans. The boys may be with them. I’m going this afternoon to visit him.”

“I doubt you’re being followed, but be careful.”

“Of course.”

“Go one stop past Montparnasse, then come back. You missed your stop. It happens. Use the car windows, whatever’s handy.”

Tolkien nodded. “What will you do?”

“I’m not sure. I can’t sit around. Makes me crazy. I may introduce myself to whoever’s following me.”

“Don’t get killed. I need you.”

“Not a chance. I haven’t had my share yet.”

“Your share of what?”

“Women, whiskey, gin, handmade suits, good cigarettes. Adventure.”

“I see,” Tolkien said, thinking
what about love?
Nevertheless, he acknowledged, with a smile, the ironic respect that the traditionalist will pay to the rake.

“Golf.” Fleming said, not smiling, his face a mask of faux seriousness. “I should include golf. And bridge.”

“For money.”

“Not worth the time otherwise. I say, professor, if I may change the subject. How does the priest know you’re actually sorry for your sins?”

“He doesn’t. If he has any doubt, he errs on the side of saving a soul. A good policy, don’t you think?”

Fleming’s answer was a wry smile, an acknowledgement of the ironic respect that the rake will pay to the man of faith.

In the Tuileries, as the sun began to break through scattering clouds, the lemonade and snack stalls that were shuttered were beginning to reopen and the park’s acrobats and mimes to reappear. The urgency of this redeployment—the rain had only stopped a few minutes ago—struck Ian Fleming as sad. Walking along a wide cinder path toward the Grand Basin in his blazer and bow tie, the late May sun warm on his bare head, the sense of desperation in the air was hard for the Englishman to miss. In April, just a month ago, the
drole de guerre
, as the French liked to call it, was at its apex. The cafes and restaurants were busy, the British officer corps was fox-hunting in the suburbs on the weekends, and everyone in the City of Light seemed happy to fight a defensive war, to ignore a thousand years of Teutonic aggression. But now the Wehrmach was sixty kilometers away, and Paris about to be declared an open city. It would not be burned, but it would be occupied. Each of the two million adults left would have to decide how best to negotiate the swarm of uniformed brutes that was about to take control of their lives. Resist? Collaborate? Profit? Subsist? It struck Fleming as he walked that there was a great novel in each of those two million stories.

Fleming circled the basin twice, once slowly and the second time a beat faster. The blue umbrella had been discarded, but the man who had been using it was still following him. At the completion of the second trip around the water, Fleming turned onto the Grand Allée in the direction of the Louvre. Halfway there, he stopped to pick up a paper hat that had blown off the head of one of the few children left in Paris. Lucky me, thought Fleming. Crouching, he turned and saw his tail—slender, short brown hair, middle height, thirties, gray suit—still behind him by perhaps fifty meters.

On the plaza that fronted the Louvre, a squad of gendarmes carrying rifles were forcing a crowd of perhaps two hundred people away from the museum’s entrance, as a French army officer was climbing onto the hood of a canvas-covered lorry. Through a megaphone, the officer was informing the crowd, many of whom were clutching cheap luggage or children, or both, that the plaza could no longer be used for gatherings of any kind. The crowd listened and quietly murmured, except for one bedraggled woman straddling a bicycle, with a child in her arms and a parrot cage at her feet, who shouted in broken French, “We are not spies. We are not your enemy!”

The city, Fleming knew, was bloated with tens of thousands of Dutch, Belgians, and Frenchmen from the North, all fleeing the dreaded blitzkrieg. So paranoid were the Parisians who themselves had not fled that many believed there to be thousands of German spies hidden in this mass of homeless people. Rumors of German paratroopers descending on the city’s suburbs dressed as priests and nuns were rampant. The chaos had begun.

Walking around to the back of the Louvre, Fleming noticed a line of twenty or so lorries lined up, and a steady stream of soldiers carrying crated artwork out of the famous museum and loading it into them. He stopped to chat with the lieutenant supervising this operation, who looked at him as if he had two heads, possibly three.
Allez!
he spit out. Fleming, bowing, backed away, then turned and walked behind the line of lorries. The last dozen, curling backwards into an alley, were empty. He stood at the transom of the last lorry, slipped the strap of his palm sap around his wrist and waited. When the tail passed, Fleming stepped quietly forward and whacked him in the back of the head, knocking him abruptly to the ground. The leather-covered lead cylinder that fit so nicely in the palm of Fleming’s hand had done its work. The man was out cold, with a lump the size of a tennis ball rising on his head. A quick search yielded a
Carte d’Identité Scolaire
issued by the University of France to Polish-born Julien Molewski, and a billfold containing two thousand francs.

Leaving Julian where he was, Fleming stepped from behind the lorry and headed across the sun-splashed street toward the church of St-Germaine l’Auxerrois, where refugees, probably the ones chased from the Louvre, were beginning to gather on the church’s wide front esplanade. Off to the right, separated from the crowd, he noticed a woman with long brown hair in a light blue dress reading from a guide book and looking up at the thirteen-hundred-year-old church. When she saw him, she waved and started walking his way. He did the same.

“Mr. Harrington,” she said when they met.

Fleming recognized her but did not answer.

“Marlene Weil,” she said. “We met at Maxim’s.”

“Of course,” he replied. “You are much too beautiful for any man to forget.”

“How nice to see you again.”

“Such August company you were in, fraulien.”

“Yes, my father does a great deal of business with Miss Chanel.”

“Mustn’t let the war stop all that.”

“No. Your cufflinks were quite the thing.”

“Yes, I had to show the duke. They were a gift from his father to mine.”

Marlene did not answer, but only smiled, the same smile that was on her face when he took her picture with his left cufflink two nights ago.

“It’s sad,” Fleming said, “isn’t it?”

“Sad?”

“To be a tourist in a city that is about to be placed in shackles.”

“It is my only chance.”

“And your father? Is he sightseeing as well?”

“No, he is working in his room.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Ritz.”

“How long are you stopping?”

Now came an awkward silence as Fleming thought his thoughts and watched Marlene Weil—identified the day before by MI-6 as Marlene Jaeger, a Berlin clerical worker thought most definitely to be an Abwehr agent—thought hers.

“We are Jewish,” Marlene said finally. “We are not waiting with baited breath for the Werhmacht to take Paris.”

“And you don’t want to go back to Berlin.”

“Would you?”

Fleming did not answer, just shook his head in what he hoped looked like a gesture of sincere empathy. Obviously not, he thought, if I were a Jew. And if you were
really
a Jew and not a spy, I might take more pleasure in our supposed chance second meeting and the unfolding of our love affair.

“What will you do?” he said finally.

“I don’t know. Miss Chanel has offered to help us. Perhaps go south, perhaps a flight to Lisbon.”

Ah yes, Fleming thought. The horizontal collaborator. Seen last at Maxim’s with a man MI-6 tentatively identified as the Italian aristocrat Count Vittorio di Leo, an alleged diplomat and friend of il Duce. Thank God for those cufflinks, a gift, not from King George V to Valentine Fleming, but from Eddie Jones, an East End fence, to Valentine’s son, Ian, on his assignment to watch George’s son and his wife as they flitted about Europe looking for sycophants.

“A Jewish family owns a majority of
Les Parfums Chanel
,” Marlene said, when she saw that Fleming was not answering. She smiled innocently as she tried to casually confirm that
of course Coco would therefore want to help us
. “My father is one of their business agents.”

“The Wertheimers,” said Fleming.

“Yes.”

“How fortunate for you, then.”

“Yes, we are grateful.”

“Shall I see you again? You and your father, of course.”

“I love my father, Mr. Harrington,” Marlene replied, “but he does not care for drink or nightlife of any kind. Except perhaps going to bed early.”

“He seemed to be enjoying himself at Maxim’s.”

“He was working.”

“I see. Well, just us then, if you can bear it. Shall we meet in the Ritz lobby at eight?”

“
Mais oui
. I look forward to it.
A bientot
, Mr. Harrington.”

“My friends call me Ian.”

“I thought it was Tony.”

“Ian’s my middle name. I much prefer it.”

“Ian.
A bientot
, Ian.”

“
Introibo ad altare Dei
.”

John Ronald Tolkien knew what these words meant—
I will go unto the altar of God
—but had trained himself to
experience
the Roman Mass rather than be instructed by it, to, as much as was humanly possible, simply exist in the midst of the ancient rite rather than think about it. He hoped the priest saying the mass was Father Alain LaToure, but, as the man in the green chasuble, whoever he was, began to recite the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar—as the great mystery that was the life, passion and death of Jesus Christ, began to unfold—Tolkien let go of this thought. He was no longer an Oxford professor, a husband, a father or an amateur spy, but simply a soul joined with the universe. How he entered this state he did not know and did not care to know. He did know that this mindless and exhilarating experience of God is what had turned an obedient and lonely Catholic boy, an orphan, into a devout Catholic man, one of the faithful.

“Father, may I speak to you?”

“Who are you?”

“I have been to see Father Jacques.”

“I ask again, who are you?”

Tolkien had exited the small church on the grounds of the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion convent and waited on the lawn between it and the rectory, approaching Father Alain when he appeared, now in the simple bottomless soutane that the Jesuits had worn for centuries, his white clerical collar encircling his neck. The priest—a dark-haired, handsome man in his mid-forties—had stopped abruptly on hearing Tolkien’s voice, and just as abruptly squared off to face the Englishman full on. He had barked out his first question, and the second, though in a quieter tone, was no less confrontational.

“My name is John Tolkien. I am a professor of English literature at Oxford. I am here on a mission for my government.”

“What kind of mission?”

“I am looking for a boy, two boys—two German boys.”

“Tolkien is a German name.”

“It is, but I am English, I assure you.”

“What did Father Jacques say?”

“He said you took the boys, Conrad Friedeman and Karl Brauer.”

“He is a naïve man, Father Jacques, too trusting.”

Tolkien’s expectations regarding Father Alain had been informed by the humble demeanor of Father Jacques, the only other Jesuit he had ever met. LaToure’s anger was a surprise, not only in contrast to Father Jacques, but as opposed to the dull sort of hopelessness he had seen on the faces of the Parisians he had met thus far. Though his black eyes still burned, the priest now seemed to relax a bit. His tone of voice when speaking of Father Jacques was more respectful than angry. His right hand, which had been oddly resting on his right hip, he now extended downward.

“How can I convince you to trust me?” Tolkien said.

“Are you really who you say you are, a professor of English literature?”

“Yes, I am.”

“A
Catholic
professor of English Literature?”

“You saw me?”

“You did not take communion.”

“Does that mean I’m not Catholic?” Now it was Professor Tolkien’s turn to be angry. Normally, he would have been embarrassed to be marked as a sinner, but for a priest, who forgives sin not in his own name but in the name of Christ, to do it…that itself seemed sinful.

Tolkien watched as Father LaToure parted his lips to speak and then closed them abruptly.

“‘He that hears you hears me, and he that despises you despises me.’” These words, learned as a boy over thirty years ago and never repeated, nor thought of, since, leapt unbidden from the Englishman’s heart.

“You know the Book of John?” the priest asked.

“My guardian was a priest. He bade me memorize it.”

Tolkien and LaToure, both trying to survive in a war zone, looked hard at each other for a brief moment, silently acknowledging as they did their shared Catholic heritage and its core tenet: that all humans—including them, indeed, especially them—are sinners in need of redemption.

“These two boys,” said LaToure finally, his body language slightly less defensive, “are they innocent?”

“Yes, completely,” Tolkien replied, “and I must bring them back to England.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter why? They will not be harmed. On the contrary.”

“I must know.”

“If I tell you, I will only be exposing you to danger, great danger.”

“It is not myself I am concerned for, it is the people who have taken custody of the two boys.”

“Ah, so you…”

“Do you think we are all cowards in France, Professor Tolkien?” Father Alain returned to barking, his face flushed. He spit on the ground.

“Of course not.”

“The rich are leaving Paris like rats.”

Tolkien did not answer. He looked down at the brown stain on the lawn where the priest’s saliva had landed. Had he been reaching for his chewing tobacco? Or was it a weapon?

“Do you know why communism is so popular here, professor?”

“Father, I—”

“I will tell you. The rich are pigs.”

Silence. How to reply to this?

“Who are these boys?” Father Alain asked.

“Conrad is carrying the formula for a new kind of weapon,” Tolkien replied. “An unimaginably destructive weapon. If the Germans capture him first, they will win the war in a matter of months.”

“Nothing of importance was found on the boys.”

“You searched them?”

“The people who have them did.”

“Nevertheless.”

Both men looked up when they heard popping noises, to see the white puffs of antiaircraft shells as they exploded in the northern sky, a sky that was cloudless and achingly blue, a sky that did not know that Paris was about to be invaded. The day before, a squadron of German bombers had flown over but not dropped any bombs. On the metro heading to Montparnasse, Tolkien had seen preparations underway to convert several large stations to bomb shelters, cots and blankets piled against tiled walls, crates of canned food, candles, and bandages being opened and unloaded.

“It will not be long now,” the priest said. “A matter of days.”

“The code name for my mission is Shiva,” said Tolkien.

“The Hindu god of destruction.”

“Yes.”

“I will try to confirm that you are who you say you are.”

“We have no time for that.”

“There are people here who have put their lives at risk for these boys. I must receive confirmation.”

Images of Paris in the throes of preinvasion schizophrenia passed through Tolkien’s mind. Steel girders across the Champs d’Elysées, well dressed people smoking and drinking and smiling under bright sunshine at sidewalk cafes, caravans of trucks and cars and bicycles and horse-drawn carts loaded with furniture, pets and children heading south on the Boulevard St. Michel, lines of chatting and laughing people at movie theaters, Prime Minister Reynaud on the radio announcing the treason of the Belgian king. How would this convent priest get through to MI-6 in all this chaos?

“I will want something in return,” Father Alain said, breaking into the newsreel in Tolkien’s mind.

“What?” he replied.

“Thompson submachine guns. Two hundred, with ammunition times ten.”

“Father…”

“I am staying to fight, professor. Those are my terms.”

Tolkien smiled as something tight in his heart let loose. He had met two resistance fighters in the short time he had been in Paris, both Catholic priests. There was hope.

“How shall I contact you?” he asked.

“I will contact you. Where are staying?”

“The Meurice.”

“There is a café two blocks south, Le Café de le Petit Flore. Go there every morning at ten. If a boy approaches and asks for money for bread, give him a one sou piece and follow him. A ten year old boy, wearing a blue shirt.”